The English Together Project

The English Together project takes teachers on a journey during which they join a large network of peers who support each other, co-operate, and together strive to improve the English learning experience of students in lower secondary state schools.

The aim is to introduce new classroom practices and create classrooms where students feel comfortable to talk and are actively involved in the learning process, which will ultimately contribute to an enriched English learning experience and improved outcomes of students in state lower secondary schools.

English language teachers participating in this nationwide Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Programme will enrich their teaching experience through applying new communicative language teaching methodologies and creating engaging extracurricular materials to use in their classrooms.

Teachers from all over Turkey will be engaged in peer learning through Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) as a core means of improving their classroom performance.

Teachers as drivers of change

The English Together project puts teachers in the centre and sees teachers as the drivers of systematic change. The project applies a community-based approach which skills and empowers teachers to work together in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to reflect on their teaching practices, understand their problems and find solutions together. The PLCs will be a core means of improving teachers’ classroom performance empowering them to feel confident in applying new teaching methodologies.

The British Council aims to connect teacher educators and English language teachers in the UK and Turkey and help teachers to access resources which will support their classroom teaching and join professional networks.

The Ministry will engage school leaders to support teachers to ensure the sustainability of the professional development activities carried out by teachers.

All project activities are developed based on analysis of teachers’ needs and revised based on feedback from teachers.

Delivery Partners

A variety of sources of UK expertise will be brought into the project. UK English Language Teaching organisations and professionals will deliver training programmes and other services, always taking care to localise training and materials to fit the Turkish context.

So far Edinburgh College has successfully designed and delivered training for Master Mentor Trainers and Mentor Teachers. Currently UK Language Courses is supporting the establishment of Professional Learning Communities.

UK English Language Teaching publishers have provided high quality English language teaching and learning resources for the Ministry’s Learning Management System, the EBA platform. This opportunity gave publishers wide scale access, for the very first time, to the state education system, increasing their visibility in Turkey.

The British Council was able to catalyse a partnership that resulted in the delivery of 20 live webinars on the Ministry’s online platforms with content developed by the UK English Language Teaching publishers. The webinars on EBA were viewed over a quarter of a million times by English language teachers between June and November 2020.

Due to the success of these webinars and continued demand from teachers Cambridge Assessment, Cambridge University Press, Macmillan Education, Oxford University Press, and Pearson will continue to develop asynchronous webinars for the EBA platform in 2021.

Project activities

The project is based on a peer learning process where selected teachers are trained to become Master Mentor Trainers (MMTs) or Mentor Teachers (MTs). MMTs lead on the creation and implementation of Continuing Professional Development programmes though Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). The MMTs support MTs to establish PLCs in their school or district. In the PLCs, teachers from the same area meet to share experience and learn about a variety of topics based on their needs and interests and make action plans to try out ideas for extracurricular activities from the PLCs in their lessons. Best practice examples from the classrooms of PLC participants are identified, shared and promoted on a national scale through EBA, the Ministry’s Learning Management System and other channels.